


sinnerman (where you gonna run to?)

by villklovn



Series: life (and all its fragile intricacies) [3]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: 1960s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Assassination, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt Klaus Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, M/M, No Incest, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Protective Number Five | The Boy, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, Vietnam War, prompt: i should have been better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22962415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villklovn/pseuds/villklovn
Summary: Five is tasked with killing an unauthorized time-traveler. He’s given a time, a place, and a name.Klaus Harris must die on the front lines in Vietnam on February 1969.(For the Bad Things Happen Bingo. Prompt: "I Should Have Been Better".)
Relationships: Dave/Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Klaus Hargreeves
Series: life (and all its fragile intricacies) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1590931
Comments: 51
Kudos: 338
Collections: Bad Things Happen Bingo





	sinnerman (where you gonna run to?)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [siriuspiggyback](https://archiveofourown.org/users/siriuspiggyback/gifts).



> Started writing this. Had a breakdown. Bon appetit
> 
> Happy very belated birthday to my main bitch [siriuspiggyback](https://archiveofourown.org/users/siriuspiggyback/profile), I love you and I suck as a friend, rip
> 
> Thanks to [ObliqueOptimism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/obliqueoptimism/profile) for helping me choose the title!
> 
> This is for the "Bad Things Happen Bingo", for the prompt "I Should Have Been Better".
> 
> Probably gonna be just two chapters, but you never know ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Hope y'all enjoy!

Five walks, silently, stepping around broken branches and puddles of water, his rifle a familiar weight against his back. His shoes leave footprints in the mud, tracing a path that leads to him, but he doesn’t look back. He doesn’t need to. He knows the rain will wash it all away, eventually.  
  
His stomach churns, his body not quite used to travelling via briefcase yet. He has to begrudgingly acknowledge how efficient it is, and hates himself for not having been able to build one himself. His powers are too unreliable, still, even after decades of complex equations and calculations, and he really could use a device like this. He just hopes he gets the chance to steal one, when the time comes.  
  
The air is hot and humid, trees surrounding him on all sides, seemingly stretching for miles on end. Five barely notices his clothes dampening with the rain. He’s worked in worse conditions, in the past. A little rain won’t stop him from doing his job.  
  
The piece of paper weighs like stone in his pocket. _Eliminate Klaus Harris_ , it says, on one side, and on the other side it indicates the place and time. _A Shau Valley, Vietnam, February 1969_ .  
  
It isn’t common for the Commission's instructions to be so vague, Five thinks. They usually include the exact date, and, more often than not, further indications regarding the preferred method of execution. This must not be too important, then. It isn’t all that surprising, really, considering that he’s still a rookie, one of the newest agents, and yet he knows he’s rising fast though their ranks. He’ll get better assignments soon, which will make it easier to gain the Handler’s trust and gather information on the Apocalypse.  
  
Many of his fellow agents are convinced he’s a sadist. _‘He must be’_ , they whisper behind his back, because that’s the only explanation for how fast and efficient he is. For how many people he can kill without leaving a trace. They aren’t completely wrong, Five has to admit. They’re right in assuming that he was an experienced killer before starting to work for the Commission. Although, Five muses, they probably wouldn’t expect him to have started and finished his training before turning thirteen.  
  
And no, he’s not a sadist. These jobs give him no pleasure, no thrill, just like his missions with his siblings never did. They’re just means to an end. He has a task to accomplish, a promise to maintain, and there aren’t enough innocents in the world to make him regret becoming a murderer, if it means he can have his family back.  
  
He’s been doing this for months, at this point, and it comes easier to him than before, sure, but he was never a saint. It’s not like that it was all that hard, the first time. He’s just more skilled, now, that’s all, with more experience under his belt. His moral compass has always been screwed, and he’s self-aware enough to admit that.  
  
This assignment in particular, though, made him hesitate. For just a moment.  
  
It’s the name, of course, _Klaus_ . It made him think of his family in the worst time possible, when he’s trying to separate the person he has become from the person he used to be. He was a murderer, even before, but he was one out of necessity, because Father trained him and forced him to be one. Now he’s hired, and paid, to kill. And sure, he’s doing it out of necessity this time, too, in a sense, but he’s not a kid anymore, and he made the conscious choice to become an assassin to have an easier time preventing the Apocalypse.  
  
He can’t help but think that some, if not all of his siblings, in his place, would have made a different decision, found another way. He thinks of little Vanya and her music and her soft words and how she would have never decided to kill so many, not even to save the world. She would have found another way.  
  
Five may be smarter, the smartest out of all of them, but he’s also a pragmatist who measures the worth of a life with equations and calculations, rather than with his conscience. (Not that there’s much left of his conscience, these days. At times, Five wonders if he ever had one at all.)  
  
His shoes squelch as he keeps trudging through the mud, making his way towards the target’s base. He’ll have to get a new pair, after this assignment, he realizes, grimacing. He doesn’t particularly enjoy having to get new clothes or shoes, having gotten used to half a lifetime of trying to make them last as long as possible. The Commission will provide them without question, without even subtracting the price from his pay, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Five should probably have worn boots, for this, but he doesn’t really have any other clothes than the ones he’s wearing and the one change he has back at Headquarters.  
  
He finally reaches his destination and hides behind some trees, resting the briefcase at his side and grabbing the rifle with both hands. He stares at the mass of soldiers as they dine together, ravenously eating rations and sharing stories. The sound of their laughter fills the air, loud in the quiet of the forest at night.  
  
A part of him almost envies them, the easy camaraderie borne of fighting together, side by side, something he used to have and didn’t cherish until he lost it. He works alone, now, ever too unpredictable to be assigned a partner, according to the Handler, and he prefers it this way, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss the old days, when he used to be able to rely on someone beside himself.  
  
Shaking himself out of his nostalgia, Five counts around twenty people scattered around the base. This must be a well-earned reprieve from their usual tiring rhythm of training, patrolling, fighting – and then rinse and repeat, until their tours end, or they die.  
  
He grew up in a very sheltered environment, true, but Sir Reginald Hargreeves made sure that his little experiments were well educated on a wide range of subjects. Five, of course, decided to focus especially on physics and history, given the nature of his powers and his plans to time travel. He probably knows more than the average person on the Vietnam War, and on wars in general.  
  
Crouched down as he is behind thick bushes, even though he knows that no one has noticed him, he makes sure to keep himself hidden. These men are the very best at what they do, the legendary 173rd Airborne Brigade, and they know their way around this forest far better than he does, so he won’t let himself take any risks. They must be preparing to fight their way to the front lines, Five realizes.  
  
He gathered some intel on his target, before coming here, as he always does, and he knows that, in a few days, this particular troop will make its move and have a disastrous fight that will end with very few survivors on their side, and many casualties on the other.  
  
The Commission didn’t provide him with a picture or even a physical description of the target, which means he has to figure out by himself which one of the soldiers it is. It’s annoying because it means that he’ll end up wasting even more time than usual, but a job is a job, and he’s not going to complain.  
  
He has to work fast. Find the mark, study him for a couple of days, and then find as inconspicuous a way as possible to dispose of him. Which, to be fair, is not going to be all that hard considering that most of these men will die in a few days from now.  
  
(They’ve been dying since they got here, Five reflects. The Vietnam War wasn’t the Apocalypse, no, but it was still the end of the world, for them. Not the end of everything, but the end of something.)  
  
As the day ends and the soldiers retire for the night, so does Five. He doesn’t sleep much, when he’s away on missions, and when he’s not, he sleeps in hour-long increments, ready to fight against any possible threat. He’s been doing it for so long that he barely remembers how it felt to be able to sleep through the night, without a knife clenched in his fist and a gun in the other, without jerking awake to ashes and _nothing else_ – except his own loneliness and fear, and, occasionally, the hope that the past forty years were no more than a nightmare.  
  
There was a time when waking up meant getting ready for a silent breakfast and training and exhaustion and silently _fuming_ as his father ordered him around and his siblings acted like _infants_ , and he hated it more than words could convey – it’s a testament to how rotten his life has become, the fact that he actually misses those days.  
  
(He tries not think of what he _really_ misses, the sound of feet running on polished floors and of laughter muffled behind hands and the smell of new books and the warmth of someone standing at his side, unafraid, trusting–)  
  
He sighs and lays down on his side on the ground, curling protectively around the briefcase and his rifle, hidden from sight by the trees, his back twinging in discomfort, and prepares himself for a very long night.  
  


* * *

  
It takes him half an hour, the next day, to identify the target, and not much longer to be sure that the man really _is_ Klaus Harris. Most of his comrades call him by his surname, which is pretty generic, but a few soldiers, whom Five assumes to be his friends, call him Klaus. Not many people would have called their sons a German name, in this time period, so Five can pretty much safely assume that _this_ Klaus is the right one. It takes him the rest of the day to study him a bit more.  
  
Apparently, his target is quite close to most people in the unit, but particularly so to one David Katz, with whom he spends almost the entirety of his time. In Five’s opinion, Katz looks like the kind of man who, if circumstances were different, wouldn’t have touched a weapon if his life depended on it. Well, in this scenario, all these soldiers’ lives depend on knowing how to shoot a gun, and appearances are often deceiving, but Five maintains his stance on the guy being a pacifist.  
  
Harris is harder to figure out. He looks like a blow of wind could knock him over, and he seems to have adopted the role of the jester, always joking around with his fellow soldiers, trying to lighten the mood, and yet, as they proceed towards the front lines, he manages to warn the other men away from more than a few mines and seems to have a knack for sensing ambushes before anyone else.  
  
He’s clearly not as incompetent as he looks, and Five wonders if he chooses to appear vulnerable on purpose, to make other people lower their guard around him, to be able to take advantage of their weaknesses – or maybe that’s just the assassin in him talking, and Harris really is that open, that unguarded around others, that unafraid in the face of death and failure in a way Five could never be.  
  
Whatever the reason is, it doesn’t matter, in the end. What matters is that the guy is almost never alone, Katz following him around like a personal bodyguard, and has enough friends in the unit that his sudden disappearance _wouldn’t_ go unnoticed, so Five decides pretty early on that the best time to dispose of him will be during the fight that he knows is coming.  
  
So, three days after his arrival, he readies himself for the hit. Three days is longer than he would normally spend on a simple correction task, his personal record being of three hours between recon and the hit itself, but killing an armed soldier surrounded by his troop is not the same as killing a milkman or a nanny, guilty of having had enough of an impact on time that the Commission has deemed necessary to get rid of them, but ultimately as harmless as a fly on the wall.  
  
This time, the assignment itself is straightforward enough, but there is a high chance for complications, so Five decides to wait. He – quite literally – has all the time in the world.  
  
The day the fight is supposed to take place, Five checks and rechecks that his rifle is in working order, and then follows the soldiers as they proceed to the front lines. He makes sure to carry the briefcase with him for every step of the way, preferring to let go of it only when absolutely necessary – usually, that only happens at the moment of the hit.  
  
The hours seem to pass by faster the closer they get to the eye of the storm, the thick of the fight, and soon enough night has fallen. The moon shines down on the soldiers, and as bullets begin to rain down on them, and the first men start to fall, Five actually wonders if he’ll even need to shoot the target himself, or if some Viet Cong will do the job for him. He quickly dismisses the thought – if the Commission decided to send him at this point in time, it means that the guy would actually survive the fight without his intervention.  
  
Harris is as unpredictable during a fight as he seems to be the rest of the time, moving around, almost restlessly, from one point to the other, Katz right at his side like always, dodging bullets and shooting madly at their enemies, before finally settling down in one of the trenches closest to the other side.  
  
It’s time, Five decides, having kept a safe distance, but also aware that no one will notice him in the commotion. He pays extra attention to stray bullets, but the briefcase is built to act as a sort of shield, a useful feature for these occasions, so he holds it in front of him as he finds a good spot.  
  
He decides to risk jumping on a tree branch, trusting that no one will be able to distinguish the bluish flash of the machine from the light of the explosions. He carefully positions himself, appreciating the advantage of being higher up than the soldiers, and takes aim at the man’s back.  
  
Harris moves to raise his head and shout something Five doesn’t care to listen to, before turning back again, settling down inches away from Katz and focusing on aiming and shooting. Ironically, he’s in the almost exact position Five is in, laying on his elbows with a gun in his hands.  
  
Five breathes in, slowly, his finger lightly resting on the trigger. He drowns out the sound of the shots and the explosions and the screams around him, until his entire world reduces itself to him, the gun, and the target. His eye narrows behind the scope and he takes a moment, just one moment, to be sure that the hit will be fatal.  
  
And then he pulls the trigger.  
  
Harris jerks, minutely, and Five lowers the gun. He can see, from his perch on the tree, the man slumping forward, limp, falling face down to the ground. It’s too dark for Five to make out any blood on the uniform, but he has killed enough people to know that a shot right between the shoulder blades has a high chance of hitting the spine, the heart, or the aorta, if not all of them, granting his victims little chances of survival and a quick enough death. Five is not enough of a hypocrite to call it mercy, it’s just efficiency on his part, but this is war, and this is a far kinder end than most soldiers get.  
  
He stays there long enough to hear Katz’s screams and to see him grab Harris and turn him around, shaking him, holding his face, his voice joining the cacophony of gunshots, bombs and anguished screams that will haunt the survivors of this war forever. The target lays unmoving under his comrade’s arms, and Five sees Katz lay his head on his chest and start to sob.  
  
More than friends, then. Five had suspected, but not known for sure, and he honestly doesn’t care much. It changes nothing. He thinks of Delores and how he found companionship and comfort at the end of the world, just like these two men found it in each other’s arms, in the middle of the war. He remembers how hard it was, to let her go.  
  
Five almost feels bad for them, having to lose each other so close to the end. Almost, but not enough to regret it. It’s a safe bet that Katz will join Harris soon enough, anyway. He appears distraught enough to not pay attention to the ongoing fight.  
  
Satisfied that the hit was successful, Five opens the briefcase. A moment later, he’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> no one:  
> absolutely no one:  
> me: *yeets this trash into the void*
> 
> EDIT (1st December 2020): I'm marking this one as complete for now, since I don't know if I'll ever continue it. I do have plans for it, so there's hope yet! But it can stand as a one-shot, too, so I'll mark it complete for now, so I can focus on other projects. Thank you guys for your reviews and support! <3


End file.
